Weixuan Kong is a PhD student in Anthropology at Rice University studying how people form attachments, solidarities, and collective worlds in an era of increasingly porous boundaries between digital and physical life.

Their current work explores these questions through animated and fictional forms in China and transnational contexts. They are interested in how people create meaning from fictional narratives, form affective attachments to fictional characters, and negotiate identity and desire through engagement with fictional worlds. Their research also investigates the distributed labor, creative industries, gig economy, and governmental policies that sustain and constrain these forms, as well as the ways online and offline socialities intersect with questions of class, gender, and generation.

Empirically, Kong studies anime-style gacha games (known in Chinese as er you, or “two-dimensional games”) and their growing transnational fandoms. They are also particularly interested in cosplay practices, especially the kigurumi subgenre. By tracing the circulation of fictional forms across media, markets, and national boundaries, Weixuan explores how their popularity reveals about media circulation, youth cultures, and generational transformations in China and beyond.

Before joining Rice, Kong earned a B.A. in Anthropology and Computer Science from the University of Rochester, where they also pursued interdisciplinary study in visual and cultural studies through the Take Five Scholars Program